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There must be another way to separate those 4800 layers. It does 80 layers per hour, two and a half days constant processing. Or is my computer not suitable?

Mr. Jigsaw

Today I decided that I would open this blog and create a yahoo-id. It might be helpful to have a chat with others that help me with this project.

Help from Australia

For me it was a very complex thing to understand ImageMagick - Thanks to Anthonny much of the tasks can be easily automated. With some small settings everything can be adjusted. It really is magic what happens, but with some study of all the step by step examples he showed me, I get some insight of what is going on.

I can't wait until after the weekend, and hope to see some more scripts. From what once started as a simple on-line puzzle, it has gone already to something with automated task, that eventually will do puzzle-piece generation after a file upload. - I guess it is time to start working on the DHTML/CSS side to actually drag around the pieces on a green screen....

Magic ?

today I installed ImageMagick - a great library of unix-style commands and made my first 3D-embossed stuff. I have a long way to go to master these routines with too many options. I might better ask some more help from some expert

To explain what I actually want I had been busy making tons of example files. This time, a lot of hand crafted work

• searching for a nice picture
  Amsterdam Channals
• Puzzle Pro having create all the jig-saw pieces
• Saving all the black&white layers as masks
• Masking one single piece
• Cropping it into a small photoshop file
• Setting bevel-emboss effect and add shadow
• Rotate the file in steps of 15 degrees
• Saving as transparant PNG files

I hope that Anthony Thyssen can write me the script that will do this nasty job for me - this is not something easy to do for PhotoShop batch processing

Puzzle Pro has not a very nice way to number the pieces and does mix up the column order - In the next update 3.0 - this will be fixed in favour of the advanced useres. So, nice to hear I'm an advanced user - but puts me up with the next problem. Will need some magic to find out what layer is which puzzle piece, by finding the smallest surrounding bounding box. How? No Idea, but I'll find a way to get this working.

my first succes with the NetPNM routines

Yeah! - I managed to place the puzzle piece - with transparency!

Yet it is still a long way to go before it actually is an automated proces - especially if you want it to make it run smoothly in the future and speed up proccessing in advance

Good old UNIX

They say that one never forgets how to walk - with my 12year outdated unix experiences it like the same. But I'm very happy with some project like "DarwinPorts" that enabled me to get the netPNM libraries running on my computer.

So, now I started playing with all those routines there are now placed on my computer; over 300 new commands to work with graphics. My first attempt was not bad at all, only need to figure out how to work with the transparencies of the puzzle pieces, but I'll manage.

The puzzle is going to become more realistic too, the pieces will be 'rotatable' in steps of 15 degrees. uhm yes.... 24 variants of every single piece, 4800 pieces already - some batch processing might be nescecary. But in day life, one does not know how a piece needs to be place, rotate it a quarter turn, another? Unless there is a clear pattern one can see how it needs to be place. Four rectangular versions would be enough, but I think I will love the animation effect and need the intermediate images too.

Back too playing around with the unix scripts for manipulating the files. That transparency will work (I have read it somewhere) and positioning at the right place will be worked on too, also re-slicing the file again is something to do, I can't have 1MByte files sizes to transmit on the web; small chunks and some kind of inteligent caching or some kind of streaming will have to solve the problem.

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Frans van Hoesel

If you don't know him? He is my brother. A genius! - Anyways, you have been using his inventions over and over - HTML - imagemaps are his addition to the internet.

I asked him for some assistence on this crazy project.

He made it even more complex as he wants to be able to put floating pieces together and than drag them together arround on the green background - this was an option the radio reporters wanted too but ommediatly saw the problem of who can drag which piece and when.

Anyways, he greatly helped me with the correct unix-libraries NetPBM

The Milliondollar Homepage Blog

Today I had to leave to Utrecht for study and had some time to travle by train - so I took a copy of The Million Dollar Homepage blog with me to read about Alex and his storry - the pitfalls I might avoid, the stress I have to face, the emotions he has gone thru, tech problems to deal with. But also the euphoria he went thru

Only half finished the copy I took with me but learned very much already

Ravensburger

One way to get money, is to do all the stuff your self - another way is to make sure there will be some money from advertisers. I was thinking abot Google-AdSense which is an easy way to make it work - another way is to look for an advertiser. What is it worth for an advertiser to be on a page tat draws millions of people?

An other question I had is what is it that makes a puzzle a puzzle, when is it good and when not. This put me up with a new problem as the European market is already different drom the USA and even here in Europe there is a difference between the continent and the Isle of Britain. Leave me up to my wn choice I think, or maybe I'll ask them to take a look at my suggestions.

The last thing I wanted to know was the option to cut my puzzle exactly as how the AV-Bros plugin would define it - unfortunatly, 3000 puzzles is not much abd probably have to look for an alternative

Puzzled

Some pieces of the puzzle drop in place automaticly, others will have to be put aside and wait untill the pieces that it is attached to come in place

This puzzle project is getting far to complex, as there are so many options I have to consider now, before someone steals my idea and makes more money with it than I am going to earn with it

I just got an e-mail from Israel, and I have the software to create puzzle pieces - sofar, that goes well - but now I end up in thousands of huge PhotoShop files. I have to figure out how to reduce them but maintain the information where the piece needs to be located

Next I will see if that programmer in Germany has an idea how to build the puzzle together

And many things that need to be thought about - one thing is the reason of raising this fund....

AV-Bros

Today I got that nice PhotoShop™ plugin to create the puzzle pieces - it's marvelous - and I must thank Mr. Alex Shalikashvili who freely gave this plugin to build the website.

It creates from any imagefile a puzzle with all kinds of shapes etc. etc. - please check out their website to see lots of features - now there is only one problem I have to work on - how to cut those 3000+ huge .psd files back to 72x72 pixels .png files

Only once in a life time

Sometimes there are opportunities only once a life time - and I hope I have one here and will make some extra cash.

Selling pieces of a virtual jigsaw puzzle…

Tomorrow I wil call the radio station, the reporters have seen every remarkable thing on the web, part of my idea is from what I heard a long time ago.

Tetris puzzle